In 1999 Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik won a Pulitzer Prize. Now a business columnist for the Times, he writes that Ivermectin, "the latest supposed treatment for COVID-19 being touted by anti-vaccination groups, had 'no effect whatsoever' on the disease, according to a large patient study." (Alternate URL here) That's the conclusion of the Together Trial, which has subjected several purported nonvaccine treatments for COVID-19 to carefully designed clinical testing.

The trial is supervised by McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and conducted in Brazil. One of the trial's principal investigators, Edward Mills of McMaster, presented the results from the Ivermectin arms of the study at an Aug. 6 symposium sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Among the 1,500 patients in the study, he said, Ivermectin showed "no effect whatsoever" on the trial's outcome goals — whether patients required extended observation in the emergency room or hospitalization. "In our specific trial," he said, "we do not see the treatment benefit that a lot of the advocates believe should have been" seen...

The Ivermectin camp, as I reported earlier, is heavily peopled by anti-vaccination advocates and conspiracy mongers. They maintain that the truth about the drug has been suppressed by agents of the pharmaceutical industry, which ostensibly prefers to collect the more generous profits that will flow from COVID vaccines. The problem, however, is that the scientific trials cited by Ivermectin advocates have been too small or poorly documented to prove their case. One large trial from Egypt that showed the most significant therapeutic effect was withdrawn from its publishers due to accusations of plagiarism and bogus data. Nevertheless, the advocates have continued to press their case — without necessarily observing accepted standards of scientific discourse. During the symposium, Mills complained that serious researchers looking into claims for COVID treatments have faced unprecedented abuse from advocates.

"I've had enough abuse and so have the other clinical trialists doing Ivermectin," he said. "Others working in this area have been threatened, their families have been threatened, they've been defamed," he said...

Asked whether he expected further criticism from Ivermectin advocates, he said it was all but inevitable. "The advocacy groups have set themselves up to be able to critique any clinical trial. They've already determined that any valid, well-designed critical trial was set up to fail."

Boeing's Starliner astronaut capsule won't be launching to the International Space Station until it's gone through "deeper-level troubleshooting" to fix an issue with stuck propulsion system valves, according to a press release from the company. That troubleshooting means removing the capsule from the Atlas V rocket it's been coupled to and bringing it back to Boeing's facility. The Verge reports: The spacecraft's initial launch attempt late last month was scrubbed hours before liftoff after engineers noticed a group of fuel valves in the Starliner's propulsion section weren't positioned as programmed. That valve issue, whose cause remains a mystery, is the latest engineering predicament to curse Starliner nearly two years after the capsule failed its first attempt to reach the space station in 2019. With a clear fix to the valve issue still elusive, having to take Starliner back to the hangar will push Boeing's plans to launch this month off the table, and a logjam of other scheduled flights could extend the delay by several months.

According to Boeing VP John Vollmer, the company will "continue to work the issue from the Starliner factory and have decided to stand down for this launch window to make way for other national priority missions." The new launch date will have to be jointly decided by NASA, Boeing, and the United Launch Alliance after the issue with the valves has been found and fixed. Boeing has said software isn't to blame for Starliner's new valve problem, and indicated in past statements that it's a more complex hardware issue.

"San Francisco became the the first major US city to mandate proof of full vaccinations for certain indoor activities Thursday," reports CNN. Earlier this month, New York City announced a similar requirement, but it's only requiring workers and patrons have at least one vaccine dose administered. CNN reports: City residents age 12 and older will now be required to show proof they have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 in order to enter indoor restaurants, bars, gyms and theaters, as well as large event spaces with at least 1,000 people, according to an announcement from Mayor London Breed. The new mandate is scheduled to go into effect August 20.

"We know that for our city to bounce back from the pandemic and thrive, we need to use the best method we have to fight COVID-19 and that's vaccines," Breed said in a statement. "Many San Francisco businesses are already leading the way by requiring proof of vaccination for their customers because they care about the health of their employees, their customers, and this City." The San Francisco health order also beefs up a state order mandating vaccines for health care workers by extending the directive to pharmacists, dental offices, home health aides and residential care centers.

When a World Health Organization-led team traveled to China earlier this year to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, a top official said he was worried about safety standards at a laboratory close to the seafood market where the first human cases were detected, according to a documentary released Thursday by Danish television channel TV2. The Associated Press reports: The Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was handling coronaviruses "without potentially having the same level of expertise or safety or who knows," Peter Ben Embarek said during a conference call in January, according to footage shown by TV2. Ben Embarek is a WHO expert on disease transmission from animals to humans and one of the team's leaders. But months later, when WHO released its dense report on its mission to Wuhan, the U.N. health agency concluded that a leak of the virus from the lab was "extremely unlikely" to have caused COVID-19. The WHO report even lent credence to a fringe theory promoted by the Chinese government that the virus may have been spread via frozen seafood packaging.

In recent weeks, however, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has acknowledged it was "premature" to rule out a possible lab leak as the source of COVID-19, saying last month that he was asking China to be more transparent about the early days of the pandemic. "I was a lab technician myself. I'm an immunologist and I have worked in the lab and lab accidents happen," Tedros said. "It's common." In the Danish TV2 documentary, the WHO's Ben Embarek is pictured arriving in China, inspecting the stalls at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan and examining what he hypothesizes might have been living quarters for people who handled live animals there -- raising the possibility that the virus may have jumped from animals to people at the market. "It would mean that the contact between the human beings and whatever may have been in the market i.e. virus and maybe live animals would have been more intense," Ben Embarek said. "It goes without saying that the close contact would be doubled many times between humans and animals if you are among them around the clock."

The Danish documentary also featured Ben Embarek expressing his worries in January about the Wuhan branch of the Chinese CDC, concerns that have never been publicly disclosed by WHO. While numerous experts have questioned whether there might have been a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology -- where scientists were studying coronaviruses -- there has been less interest in another nearby facility. "What is more concerning to me is the other lab," Ben Embarek said. "The one that is next to the market," he explained, referring to the Wuhan branch of the Chinese CDC, located just 500 meters (547 yards) away from the Huanan market. In a June interview, Ben Embarek told TV2 that the possibility of a lab staffer being infected with the coronavirus while collecting bat samples was "likely."

According to a new study published in the journal Science, feeding supermassive black holes emit a noticeable flickering light that is directly related to their mass. "The researchers describe the flickering as the black hole equivalent of a burp," reports CNET. "It's the 'burps' that could help us come to terms with the relative sizes of not only supermassive black holes but also accreting white dwarfs and -- hopefully -- intermediate-mass black holes, or IMBHs, which are thought to have formed throughout the history of the universe but are rare and hard to find." From the report: When dormant, supermassive black holes are typically quite dull and don't emit much light. When active and feeding, however, they produce a pattern of flickering light we can detect from across the universe, ranging from hours to decades. "There have been many studies that explored possible relations of the observed flickering and the mass of the SMBH, but the results have been inconclusive and sometimes controversial," said Colin Burke, an astronomy graduate student and lead author of the study.

The team, led by Burke, analyzed the variability patterns to identify a characteristic timescale, allowing them to equate the flickering patterns with the mass of a supermassive black hole. When it comes to these active, feeding supermassive black holes, shorter timescales of flickering indicate a smaller black hole, while longer timescales indicate more massive black holes. [...] "Now that there is a correlation between the flickering pattern and the mass of the central accreting object, we can use it to predict what the flickering signal from an IMBH might look like," Burke said.

Despite working on next-generation suits for years, they won't be ready until 2025 at the earliest, an inspector general determined. From a report: Ever since the White House directed NASA to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 as part of its Artemis program, there have been all sorts of daunting challenges: The rocket the space agency would use has suffered setbacks and delays; the spacecraft that would land astronauts on the surface is not yet completed and was held up by the losing bidders; and Congress hasn't come through with the funding NASA says is necessary. But another reason the 2024 goal may not be met is that the spacesuits needed by the astronauts to walk on the lunar surface won't be ready in time and the total development program, which ultimately will produce just two flight-ready suits, could cost more than $1 billion.

The NASA Inspector General said in a report Tuesday that the suits have been delayed by almost two years because of funding shortfalls, impacts from the coronavirus pandemic and technical challenges. As a result, the government watchdog concluded that the suits would not be ready until 2025 at the earliest and that "a lunar landing in late 2024 as NASA currently plans is not feasible." NASA has been working on next-generation spacesuits, which act as mini spaceships that protect the astronauts from the vacuum of space, for 14 years, the IG said. In 2016, NASA decided to consolidate two spacesuit designs into a single program that it would oversee. By 2017, the agency had spent $200 million and since then has spent an additional $220 million, the IG found. While it took the program in-house, parts for the suits are still supplied by 27 contractors.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been orbiting an asteroid called Bennu for more than two years to fine-tune the agency's existing models of its trajectory. "As a result, scientists behind new research now say they're confident that the asteroid's total impact probability through 2300 is just 1 in 1,750," reports Space.com. From the report: Estimates produced before OSIRIS-REx arrived at the space rock tallied the cumulative probability of a Bennu impact between the years 2175 and 2199 at 1 in 2,700, according to NASA. While a slightly higher risk than past estimates, it represents a minuscule change in an already minuscule risk, NASA said. Technically, that's a small increase in risk, but the scientists behind the new research say they aren't worried about a potential impact. And besides, the lessons the research offers for asteroid trajectory calculation could reduce concerns about potential impacts by other asteroids more than enough to compensate.

"The impact probability went up just a little bit but it's not a significant change, the impact probability is pretty much the same," lead author Davide Farnocchia, who works at NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies in California, said during a news conference held Wednesday (Aug. 11). "I think that, overall, the situation has improved."

The National Institutes of Health is giving a booster dose to 200 kidney transplant patients who did not have an immune response to the COVID-19 vaccine in a new trial that launched yesterday. From a report: Many transplant patients, who have to take immunosuppressant drugs to keep their bodies from rejecting a new organ, don't produce enough antibodies -- or don't produce antibodies at all -- after getting the COVID-19 vaccine. The study will check to see if a third shot of an mRNA vaccine, given on top of the normal two-shot regimen, will generate antibodies closer to the levels seen in healthy people.

There are some indications that a third dose might help some people. In France, health officials started recommending in April that immunosuppressed patients get a third shot of the COVID-19 vaccine. Half of the patients who did not respond to two shots produced antibodies after the third, according to an analysis of 159 kidney transplant patients. The other half, though, still had no response. In Germany, one study of 48 transplant patients found that 40 percent who didn't respond to two doses had a response after the third. Two other trials looking at kidney transplant patients are also kicking off in Israel and Switzerland.

AmiMoJo writes: Reaching herd immunity is "not a possibility" with the current Delta variant, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group has said. Giving evidence to MPs on Tuesday, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard said the fact that vaccines did not stop the spread of Covid meant reaching the threshold for overall immunity in the population was "mythical." "The problem with this virus is [it is] not measles. If 95% of people were vaccinated against measles, the virus cannot transmit in the population," he told the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on coronavirus. "The Delta variant will still infect people who have been vaccinated. And that does mean that anyone who's still unvaccinated at some point will meet the virus ... and we don't have anything that will [completely] stop that transmission."

Although the existing vaccines are very effective at preventing serious Covid illness and death, they do not stop a fully vaccinated person from being infected by the virus that causes Covid-19. The concept of herd or population immunity relies on a large majority of a population gaining immunity -- either through vaccination or previous infection -- which, in turn, provides indirect protection from an infectious disease for the unvaccinated and those who have never been previously infected. Data from a recent React study conducted by Imperial College London suggests that fully vaccinated people aged 18 to 64 have about a 49% lower risk of being infected compared with unvaccinated people. The findings also indicated that fully vaccinated people were about half as likely to test positive after coming into contact with someone who had Covid (3.84%, down from 7.23%).

labloke11 shares a report from Science News: Windbreaks may sound like a counterintuitive idea for boosting the performance of a wind turbine. But physicists report that low walls that block wind could actually help wind farms produce more power. Scientists already knew that the output of a single wind turbine could be improved with a windbreak. While windbreaks slow wind speed close to the ground, above the height of the windbreak, wind speeds actually increase as air rushes over the top. But for large wind farms, there's a drawback. A windbreak's wake slows the flow of air as it travels farther through the rows of turbines. That could suggest that windbreaks would be a wash for wind farms with many turbines.

But by striking a balance between these competing effects, windbreaks placed in front of each turbine can increase power output, new computer simulations suggest. It comes down to the windbreaks' dimensions. Squat, wide barriers are the way to go, according to a simulated wind farm with six rows of turbines. To optimize performance, windbreaks should be a tenth the height of the turbine and at least five times the width of the blades, physicists report July 30 in Physical Review Fluids. Such an arrangement could increase the total power by about 10 percent, the researchers found. That's the equivalent of adding an additional turbine, on average, for every 10 in a wind farm. In the simulations, the wind always came from the same direction, suggesting the technique might be useful in locations where wind tends to blow one way, such as coastal regions. Future studies could investigate how this technique might apply in places where wind direction varies.

omfglearntoplay shares a report from ScienceAlert: According to theory, if you smash two photons together hard enough, you can generate matter: an electron-positron pair, the conversion of light to mass as per Einstein's theory of special relativity. It's called the Breit-Wheeler process, first laid out by Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler in 1934, and we have very good reason to believe it would work. But direct observation of the pure phenomenon involving just two photons has remained elusive, mainly because the photons need to be extremely energetic (i.e. gamma rays) and we don't have the technology yet to build a gamma-ray laser. Now, physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory say they've found a way around this stumbling block using the facility's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) -- resulting in a direct observation of the Breit-Wheeler process in action. The research has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Oregon Live: For the next five years, an Oregon high school diploma will be no guarantee that the student who earned it can read, write or do math at a high school level. Gov. Kate Brown had demurred earlier this summer regarding whether she supported the plan passed by the Legislature to drop the requirement that students demonstrate they have achieved those essential skills. But on July 14, the governor signed Senate Bill 744 into law. Through a spokesperson, the governor declined again Friday to comment on the law and why she supported suspending the proficiency requirements. Charles Boyle, the governor's deputy communications director, said the governor's staff notified legislative staff the same day the governor signed the bill.

Boyle said in an emailed statement that suspending the reading, writing and math proficiency requirements while the state develops new graduation standards will benefit "Oregon's Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color." "Leaders from those communities have advocated time and again for equitable graduation standards, along with expanded learning opportunities and supports," Boyle wrote. The requirement that students demonstrate freshman- to sophomore-level skills in reading, writing and, particularly, math led many high schools to create workshop-style courses to help students strengthen their skills and create evidence of mastery. Most of those courses have been discontinued since the skills requirement was paused during the pandemic before lawmakers killed it entirely. The state's four-year graduation rate is 82.6%, up more than 10 points from six years ago. However, it still lags behind the national graduation rate averages, which is 85 percent.

Oregon's graduation rates currently rank nearly last in the country. But it's complicated because states use different methodologies to calculate their graduation rates, making some states appear better than others.

A pretty little white flower that grows near urban centers of the Pacific Northwest turns out to be a killer. NPR reports: The bog-dwelling western false asphodel, Triantha occidentalis, was first described in the scientific literature in 1879. But until now, no one realized that this sweet looking plant used its sticky stem to catch and digest insects, according to researchers who note in their study published Monday that it's the first new carnivorous plant to be discovered in about 20 years. "We had no idea it was carnivorous," says Sean Graham, a botanist with the University of British Columbia. "This was not found in some exotic tropical location, but really right on our doorstep in Vancouver. You could literally walk out from Vancouver to this field site." Fewer than a thousand plant species are carnivorous, and these plants tend to live in places with abundant sun and water, but nutrient-poor soil.

Graham's team was doing an unrelated project on plant genetics and noticed that the western false asphodel had a genetic deletion that's sometimes seen in carnivorous plants. The researchers started to think about the fact that this flower grew in the kind of environment that's home to various other insect-eating plants. "And then they have these sticky stems," says Graham. "So, you know, it was kind of like, hmm, I wonder if this could be a sign that this might be carnivorous."

To see if the plants could actually take in nutrients from insects, researcher Qianshi Lin, now at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, fed fruit flies nitrogen-15 isotopes, so that this nitrogen could be used as a tracker. He then stuck these flies to stems of this plant. Later, an analysis showed that nitrogen from the dead insects was indeed getting into the plants. In fact, Triantha was getting more than half of its nitrogen from prey. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published online Monday, Lin and his colleagues say that this is comparable to what's seen in other carnivorous plants. What's more, the researchers showed that the sticky hairs on the flower stalk produce a digestive enzyme that's known to be used by many carnivorous plants. And when the research team looked at specimens of this plant preserved in herbariums, they found small dead insects stuck to the stems.

SpaceX is acquiring satellite data start-up Swarm Technologies, in a rare deal by Elon Musk's space company that expands the team -- and possibly the technological capabilities -- of its growing Starlink internet service. CNBC reports: Swarm, which has 120 of its tiny SpaceBEE satellites in orbit, reached an agreement with SpaceX on July 16 to merge, according to an Aug. 6 filing with the Federal Communications Commission. The company will become "a direct wholly-owned subsidiary of SpaceX upon consummation of the Proposed Transaction," Swarm wrote in the filing. Terms and financial details about the deal were not disclosed. Swarm last completed a fundraising round in January 2019 at a $85 million valuation, according to Pitchbook.

The deal marks an uncommon acquisition for SpaceX, which tends to design and build systems in-house. But FCC licenses can be difficult and time-consuming to get approved, and Swarm will transfer control of of its satellite and ground station licenses to SpaceX as part of the deal, according to the filing. "Swarm's services will benefit from the better capitalization and access to resources available to SpaceX, as well as the synergies associated with acquisition by a provider of satellite design, manufacture, and launch services," the filing said. The company noted that the acquisition benefits SpaceX by bringing "access to the intellectual property and expertise developed by the Swarm team."

Hmmmmmm shares a report from The Independent: Scientists in China have developed the hardest and strongest glassy material known so far that can scratch diamond crystals with ease. The researchers, including those from Yanshan University in China, noted that the new material -- tentatively named AM-III -- has "outstanding" mechanical and electronic properties, and could find applications in solar cells due to its "ultra-high" strength and wear resistance. Analysis of the material, published in the journal National Science Review, revealed that its hardness reached 113 gigapascals (GPa) while natural diamond stone usually scores 50 to 70 on the same test.

According to the scientists, AM-III has tunable energy absorption properties comparable to semiconductors commonly used in solar cells such as hydrogenated amorphous silicon films. While in diamond crystals, the organized internal structure of its atoms and molecules contribute to their immense strength and hardness, in AM-III the researchers found that a combination of order and disorder of its molecules give rise to its strange properties. Using fullerenes, which are materials made of hollow football-like arrangements of carbon atoms, the researchers produced different types of glassy materials with varying molecular organization among which AM-III had the highest order of atoms and molecules. Increasing the order further, the scientists observed, could potentially kill the semiconductivity and other properties that required the atoms and molecules to be chaotic.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Neural networks can correctly guess a person's race just by looking at their bodily x-rays and researchers have no idea how it can tell. There are biological features that can give clues to a person's ethnicity, like the color of their eyes or skin. But beneath all that, it's difficult for humans to tell. That's not the case for AI algorithms, according to a study that's not yet been peer reviewed. A team of researchers trained five different models on x-rays of different parts of the body, including chest and hands and then labelled each image according to the patient's race. The machine learning systems were then tested on how well they could predict someone's race given just their medical scans. They were surprisingly accurate. The worst performing was able to predict the right answer 80 percent of the time, and the best was able to do this 99 per cent, according to the paper.

"We demonstrate that medical AI systems can easily learn to recognize racial identity in medical images, and that this capability is extremely difficult to isolate or mitigate," the team warns [PDF]. "We strongly recommend that all developers, regulators, and users who are involved with medical image analysis consider the use of deep learning models with extreme caution. In the setting of x-ray and CT imaging data, patient racial identity is readily learnable from the image data alone, generalizes to new settings, and may provide a direct mechanism to perpetuate or even worsen the racial disparities that exist in current medical practice."

JoshuaZ writes: As the world battles historic droughts, landscape-altering wildfires and deadly floods, a landmark report from global scientists says the window is rapidly closing to cut our reliance on fossil fuels and avoid catastrophic changes that would transform life as we know it. The state-of-the-science report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the world has rapidly warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, and is now careening toward 1.5 degrees -- a critical threshold that world leaders agreed warming should remain below to avoid worsening impacts.

Only by making deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, while also removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, can we halt the precipitous trend. "Bottom line is that we have zero years left to avoid dangerous climate change, because it's here," Michael E. Mann, a lead author of the IPCC's 2001 report, told CNN. Unlike previous assessments, Monday's report concludes it is "unequivocal" that humans have caused the climate crisis and confirms that "widespread and rapid changes" have already occurred, some of them irreversibly.

That is due in part to the breakneck pace at which the planet has been recently warming, faster than scientists have previously observed. Since 2018, when the panel published a special report on the significance of 1.5-degrees, greenhouse gas emissions have continued mostly unabated and have pushed global temperatures higher. Even under the IPCC's most optimistic scenario, in which the world's emissions begin to drop sharply today and are reduced to net zero by 2050, global temperature will still peak above the 1.5-degree threshold before falling. In a statement, UN Secretary-General Antanio Guterres called the report "a code red for humanity," and noted the 1.5-degree threshold is "perilously close." "The only way to prevent exceeding this threshold is by urgently stepping up our efforts, and pursuing the most ambitious path," Guterres said.

The UK's leading funding agency has announced that all research it funds must be freely available for anyone to read.

Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger shared this report from Science: The policy by the funder, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will expand on existing rules covering all research papers produced from its £8 billion in annual funding... About three-quarters of papers recently published from U.K. universities are open access, and UKRI's current policy gives scholars two routes to comply: Pay journals for "gold" open access, which makes a paper free to read on the publisher's website, or choose the "green" route, which allows them to deposit a near-final version of the paper on a public repository, after a waiting period of up to 1 year.

Publishers have insisted that an embargo period is necessary to prevent the free papers from peeling away their subscribers. But starting in April 2022, that yearlong delay will no longer be permitted.
The funder's executive champion for open research succinctly explained their rationale.

"Publicly funded research should be available for public use by the taxpayer."

"Part of the reason that misinformation about vaccines is so intractable is that it can be very lucrative," argues a new article in Slate: For years anti-vaccine figures have made money publishing books and giving speeches, and only in the past couple of years have major sites like YouTube started preventing anti-vaxxers from directly earning revenue from advertising. During the pandemic, as the coronavirus created new markets for health hoaxes, conspiracy theorists have been able to make money online by using the misinformation that they publicize on major sites like Facebook to sell supplements and books to followers via e-commerce shops. Now, vaccine skeptics with large followings are turning to crowdfunding platforms — both the relatively obscure GiveSendGo and the decidedly mainstream GoFundMe — to monetize their activities, often to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars...

On GiveSendGo and GoFundMe, vaccine truthers often portray themselves as little guys in a fight against the pro-vaccine tyranny of big pharma, big tech, and big government, and in doing so rake in money from thousands of sympathetic donors. They're able to do it in part because of lax standards and moderation blind spots, and in part by operating in gray areas... Over the past few months, GiveSendGo has been hosting fundraisers for causes casting doubt on vaccines that have racked up huge sums... But it isn't just GiveSendGo, though, that's facilitating donations for efforts to resist coronavirus vaccines. GoFundMe is also providing services to these causes. There, however, skeptics have a workaround: They're not raising money to oppose vaccines, per se, but to oppose vaccine mandates... [T]here are numerous other GoFundMe campaigns to support people who are choosing to leave their jobs instead of getting the vaccine.

GoFundMe does, however, appear to be placing banners with links to information from the CDC and WHO on fundraising pages that promote vaccine hesitancy, unlike GiveSendGo. "Fundraisers raising money to promote misinformation about vaccines violate GoFundMe's terms of service and will be removed from the platform," GoFundMe's senior communication manager Monica Corbett wrote in an email. "Over the last several years, we have removed over 250 fundraisers attempting to promote misinformation related to vaccines. Fundraisers for legal challenges do not violate our terms of service...." As the Daily Beast reported, users have in the past found ways to get around GoFundMe's ban on vaccine misinformation by crafting their campaigns in the name of anti-vax dog whistles like "medical freedom" and "informed consent...."

[T]he platform has tried to crack down on vaccine misinformation, finding itself walking the content-moderation tightrope that other large social media platforms are familiar with, which inevitably leaves loopholes in place that purveyors of misinformation try to exploit.

Friday a CNN video offered what it calls "an exclusive look into how Space Force is defending America." CNN's Jim Sciutto reported: Inside Mission Control at Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, Colorado, Space Force Guardians, as they're known, fly the nation's missile warning satellites. Using infrared sensors, these satellites, orbiting 22,000 miles above earth, scour the planet 24/7 for missile launches and nuclear detonations.

Lt. Col. Michael Mariner: "We never stop — always vigilant — and we never fail. Because that's how important this mission is to our nation. We provide decision-quality data to tactical war fighters on the ground, to save their lives."

This satellite dish is in touch with missile-warning satellites deployed in what's known as geosynchronous orbit. If those warning satellites detect a launch anywhere on the surface of the planet, it beams that information back down to this ground station instantaneously, at the speed of light. And then Space Force sends that information, that warning, around the world to U.S. forces deployed aboard or here on the U.S. homeland. In January 2020, these satellites sprang into action, detecting multiple missiles from Iran targetting the Al Asad airbase in Iraq. Before those missiles rained down, within minutes Space Force had delivered a lifesaving warning to units on the ground. Space Force specialist Sally Stevens was on duty. "It is lightning fast."

CNN: "Right. And quick enough to take action to protect themselves."

Stevens: "Absolutely. Especially in the Al Asad night. Not very often do we get reminded of where our end data gets to, and that night was a shocking reality."

Missile-warning satellites are just a fraction of the hundreds of U.S. government and commercial satellites monitored and defended by the Guardians of the Space Force today — defended because U.S. adversaries led by Russia and China have deployed weapons to disable or destroy them. Space Force is now an independent branch of the U.S. military due to this alarming new reality. Space, once relatively peaceful territory, is now considered a potential front in any modern war.

Colonel Matthew Holston: "Space is a war-fighting domain. It's the reason that we set up the United States Space Force as a separate service. So each and every day, we're training our operators to deter conflict, but if deterrence fails, to compete and win in space."

The U.S. has far more satellites than any other nation, some 2,500, compared to 431 for China and 168 for Russia. And a whole range of U.S. military technologies depend on them... The danger for the U.S. is that greater dependence on space equals greater vulnerability to attacks in space.

Lt. Col. Michael Mariner: "When you're at the top, the target's on your back. Everybody's shooting for you."

China is launching kidnapper satellites with grappling arms capable of plucking satellites out of orbit. Russia is deploying kamikaze satellites, capable of ramming and destroying U.S. space assets. And Russia now has a new space weapon that Space Force dubs "the nesting doll."

General John W. Raymond, Space Force Chief of Space Operations: "Back in 2017, Russia launched a satellite, and it opened up and another satellite came out, and then it open up and a projectile came out. That projectile is designed to kill U.S. satellites. So in 2019 they did the same thing, but this time they put it up next to one of our satellites. And then we started talking about it."

CNN: "You warned them away?"

Raymond: "We described what is safe and professional behavior. And it's important. Today there's no rules in space. It's the wild, wild west."

Russia and China also have directed-energy weapons, which can damage or disable U.S. satellites from a distance. The age of lasers in space has already arrived. New satellites are being designed with greater maneuverability, shielding to block directed-energy weapons, and resiliency so that losing one or a few does not disable the entire system. Space Force commanders welcome the private sector's entry into space, since it gives more and cheaper options to get into orbit... Raymond: "I would bet on U.S. industry any day. It's a huge advantage that we have."
A CNN article summarizing the report adds that Ameria's adversaries" have already attempted to use space weapons to temporarily disable US satellites, using lasers and directed-energy weapons to blind or 'dazzle' them."

CNN's report concludes that space war "is not science fiction, but a battle already underway today," adding this quote from Space Force Chief of Space Operations, General John W. Raymond. "We would prefer the domain to remain free of conflict. But like in any other domain — like air, land, sea, and now space — we'll be ready to protect and defend."